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Fascinating faces
By Esther Williams
Art lovers are quite familiar with Saskia Pintelon's work in which texture, language and paint are brought together. In her forthcoming exhibition as in her past 25 one-woman-shows, she has shown a unique style of selecting aspects from the mundane, often tongue-in-cheek, making a dramatic presentation of subjects that interest her.

Her next exhibition to be held from February 3 - 23 at the Paradise Road Gallery Café features 16 of her latest paintings in sizes of approximately 5X4' showing her pre-occupation with faces that began a year ago.

"A face is like a landscape and its changes are very interesting," says the artist, an art professor in Belgium prior to living in Sri Lanka, explaining that she likes to portray what she feels about something. Aspects of special interest to her are the beauty contests, which are made much of by the media. "But only one can be queen, it is not fair!" she laughs. The matrimonial column that takes up a large portion of our newspapers is something she finds amazing. "In it as in passport photographs people present the best of their faces or details that they would like to portray to the world," she says adding that other emotions come through despite their intentions.

All the paintings have been done on recycled brown packing paper, some with some text such as 'Product of Sri Lanka' still on it, together with Chinese ink, oil sticks, acrylic paint and emulsion. Black, white and tan are dominant colours of the paintings, some of which seem to be more impressions or sketches.

Saskia and her family were in Weligama when the tsunami struck and they together with a team of volunteers initiated several relief operations. Speaking of the devastation she says, "I asked myself what can I do, I cannot clean up. The only thing I can do is paint."

This exhibition has been specially organised to help support the Belgian project - Solideal Loadstar Rehabilitation Fund for long-term rehabilitation of tsunami victims in the South.

Their guesthouse in Weligama was badly damaged. Only the frame of a painting was left behind. Saskia has managed to put the frame back on the wall and painted in the space within. "This painting went with the tsunami," as a reminder of what happened.

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